2019 - it's going to be the year of doing

brainwipe on Tue, 2019-01-01 10:17

2018 was largely wasted. Yeah, I did some stuff (Cloudship, got most of my teeth sorted) but 2019 is going to be the year of doing stuff. The next six months is going to be hard because Kate is starting doing therapy on real people and it's going to be the hardest part of her career. To help, the family has to adjust around her a bit more and that usually means me picking up the slack. That's cool, we've known it's coming since Kate started. That means that I need to be better organised and do the thinking so that when I do get free time, I can just get on with it.

So, vague goals here we go.

Bi-weekly Goals

Fly

One social thing

Attack and improve one room in the house

Creativity Goals

Explore more about my neural networks and make a video about it

New Icar website that brings together some disparate bits

Learn Blender

Make some YouTube videos - because they're fun!

Gaming Goals

Don't really have any this time; just going to potter around Minecraft and play with the chaps on Sunday night; because it's a laugh!

Comments

Weirdly, I've been doing some reading on neural networks recently, as I think we have an issue at work that could be solved by a (comparatively) simple one. My challenge in convincing senior bods that I'm not talking out of my arse...

Submitted by babychaos on Tue, 2019-01-01 10:39

Give it a go! Tensorflow is the way to go.

Submitted by brainwipe on Wed, 2019-01-02 12:32

"Learn Blender"
That's a multi year task right there :D

Blender is about to undergo a major revamp with 2.80 which brings some interesting new additions and changes
It's in Beta right now and you can get the latest builds to try out. I've tried out the alpha on a few things and found it a very different experience.

The most obvious change is the massive overhaul of the UI/UX. Blender always had a somewhat obscure if powerful UI which it's flexible workspaces allowing huge degree of customisation but a lot of inconsistencies. The release has basic changes like left click selects (rather than right as it was before) and consistency of options so things work the same way across the system to much improved menus short cuts and easier access to tools and ways of organising things tool specific gizmos and controls accessible direct from the toolbar and a host of other changes and improvements. There is also Eevee the realtime PBR viewport renderer that supports a lot of realtime effects almost everything you can do in cycles (the ray tracing engine) you can do realtime in eevee. The Workbench system that allows for greater view customisation when working like random colour for all objects in a scene making things easier to see and work with multiple mat cap and shading options.

One of the downsides to this radical change is the existing tutorials will be less applicable but since you are starting from scratch it's probably worth starting at 2.8 rather than learning the peculiarities of 2.7 when it's going to be obsolete fairly soon. I'm sure the outfits like CGCookie and BlenderGuru whose tutorials are some of the best and most polished will catch up quickly.

Submitted by Evilmatt on Wed, 2019-01-02 18:06

Thanks EMW! You're quite right, of course, definitely more than a year. However, I think I have a leg up with having learnt the esoteric mess that is Lightwave. I've followed tutorials so far and the first thing the dude said was "switch select to left mb, because WTF Blender, really?".

I'll move onto 2.8, that's a good call. I'll do that.

I want to open source Icar and Blender is one step toward that goal. All of the models can be moved directly over but UV mapping/surface painting is such a giant bastard in LW that I never designed with that in mind. I want to make new models with UV/surfaces in mind this time.

Creating and sharing in equal measure is important to keep up motivation.